Time to toughen up on Postal Voting fraud

When I was a young man, British elections were among the cleanest in the world. They are still reasonably clean. But there have been a certain number of cases - with a minority of candidates from all the main political parties responsible - where people have been caught attempting to rig the ballot. In a recent case in Reading a candidate, agent and several people who assisted them in a bad case of postal voting fraud have been sentenced to a total of fourteen years in jail.

Postal voting fraud and all other attempts to rig elections are totally unacceptable whoever does it, and should be severely punished. It is also unacceptable that the concerns expressed by the presiding judges in previous voting fraud cases over the past few years have not been acted on.

The next government must implement individual voter registration as a matter of urgency, and we need a Speaker's conference, to get cross-party agreement if at all possible, on measures to tighten the integrity of the ballot. It may be necessary to return to the previous system where people had to give a reason why they wanted a postal vote.

And the next government should take concerns raised by the Electoral Commission more seriously than the present government sometimes has.

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